


Deal Breaker

by CookieDoughMe



Series: Insecurities, Misconceptions and Bad Sex Stories [2]
Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Audrey Jennifer and Dwight are straight, Duke is bi, Everyone is Single - Freeform, F/M, Reference to Rape, discussion of consent, everyone has had just enough alcohol to overshare, julia is a lesbian, relationship disasters, sharing their bad sex stories turns into a bit of a group therapy session, trouble-free AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:08:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23475979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CookieDoughMe/pseuds/CookieDoughMe
Summary: Continuing the bad sex series, this is a group of single friends, slightly drunk, discussing the frustrations of sex life and dating. There are no Troubles, there is no actual sex, just talk.
Series: Insecurities, Misconceptions and Bad Sex Stories [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688878
Comments: 7
Kudos: 7





	Deal Breaker

As a bartender, Duke knew how to deal with a grumpy drunk at the end of his bar. But even his skills were stretched today by the presence of no less than four different people with the same creased foreheads, scrunched shoulders and insistence on being served just slightly more alcohol than was probably good for them. He didn’t have the heart to stop serving any of them though, not when he felt much the same way himself.

For the main part of the evening he was too busy working to have much time to really talk to any of them, so he did the next best thing he could and subtly (he hoped) herded them together, first of all getting Audrey to shift along the bar towards Jennifer then suggesting Dwight make space for him by joining Julia on the corner table. He didn’t see what happened to cause Jennifer and Audrey to join Dwight and Julia, but by the time things started to quieten down, the four of them were putting the world to rights at the table in the corner, mercifully out of his way. Still, he took the opportunity to go and sit with them for a bit when he took a break. Arriving in the middle of the conversation made it slightly hard to follow their slightly drunken righteous anger and he poured himself a generous whiskey when he went back to the bar, the better to follow their train of thought the next time he joined them.

The rest of the customers left just before closing time, and he sent his staff home a little after that, locking the door behind him and taking the bottle of whiskey and some glasses over to the corner table to drown his sorrows with this slightly mismatched group of friends. Evidently they had slowed down in their drinking somewhat; he knocked back another whiskey as he sat down, and he thought he might almost have caught up with them. So he poured them all a whiskey and asked them, affectionately, what they were moaning about now.

“Men,” said Audrey and Jennifer with feeling, at the same time and in much the same tone of voice as Dwight and Julia replied with “Women.”

“Ah ha,” Duke nodded knowingly. “Love’s a bitch.”

“Pffft,” Audrey made a dismissive noise at him. “We hadn’t even gotten to _love_.”

“Bedroom disasters,” Dwight filled in.

“OK what sexy stories have I missed, come on spill the beans,” Duke insisted with a wave of his fingers.

“They’ve more been _non-sexy_ stories,” replied Jennifer. “That’s where there’s been a problem.”

“Non-sexy stories,” said Duke, mulling over the concept as though new to him. “Like the time a woman - a slightly-more-drunk-than-I’d-realised woman - tried to do a striptease for me, fell and broke her arm and we spent the night in the ER instead?”

“Yes!” replied Audrey happily. “Exactly those kind of stories.”

“It didn’t quite end me in hospital,” Dwight offered, “but I nearly busted my knee due to an ex’s cat. I was carrying her to the bed. Fucking cat picked that moment to twirl itself round my ankles and I tripped. Pure luck we were close enough to the bed that she landed on it. My knee however landed on some pointy cat toy on the floor.”

“Ouch,” offered Duke.

“She did make it up to me,” Dwight offered after a moment.

No one asked for specifics but Julia held up her hand for a high five, and Dwight laughed as he returned it. As for everyone else, they were all looking at the muscles in Dwight’s arms, trying not to think too hard about how easily he would be able to carry them across the room, if he decided such a thing was a good idea.

“I broke a motel bed once,” offered Audrey after a moment, prompting Julia to offer another high five and Duke to ask for details. “Travelling around the country with the FBI isn’t as glamorous as you might hope. There was this other agent I had a thing with for a while, we would hook up when we happened to be in the same place at the same time. On this particular occasion the specific place in question was a cheap hotel room and … yeah. The bed broke. I don’t even think anything we did warranted it to be honest. I blame whoever was staying there before me.”

“Uh huh, yeah sure Audrey, very convincing,” joked Duke, and Audrey punched him playfully on the arm. He took a moment pretending to look hurt and then offered, “I almost broke my own door when I slammed it on some idiot I had to kick out for being such an idiot.”

“What kind of idiot?” Audrey asked, curious.

“I’d been seeing him - sleeping with him - for a while. I was starting to think it might almost be the start of something serious, before I found out he had a wife and kids and was in complete denial about his sexuality. I felt for him in a way but like, dude, don’t make me a part of your infidelity without telling me. And don’t deny the fact you’re gay (or bi, or something), to my face, when we were just inside each other half an hour ago.” Duke shook his head. “And then get surprised when that makes me angry. Fucking idiot.”

“You can do better than that,” Julia told him.

“Oh I have, believe me,” Duke replied with a smile.

There was a pause and then Jennifer spoke. “The idiot I had to kick out was this guy I’d been seeing for a while who repeatedly tried to talk me into … something I didn’t want to do. Kept on trying to change my mind about it.”

Jennifer paused and Audrey asked, “What kind of something? If you don’t mind me asking.” The tone had taken a slight turn from funny back to maudlin, but it wasn’t like that didn’t fit all of their moods.

Jennifer hesitated, looking slightly self conscious, but evidently decided that it was worth talking about, and once she spoke it all came out in a rush. “He kept saying I should try anal sex. I said, _No_ \- I wasn’t interested. And he asked again, and again, and every time I thought the conversation was finished, the next week he’d bring it up again. Until I had to spell it out for him that it was a deal breaker; since I wasn’t interested, if he wanted that he would have to find it somewhere else and we would be finished. He left it alone for a while after that, but then we started arguing about other stuff and broke up anyways. It always bothered me,” she continued, her self-consciousness showing in slightly reddening cheeks, “that he didn’t seem to understand what the words _‘No, I am not interested in that,’_ meant, but then afterwards it also bothered me that I could never understand why he was so interested in it in the first place. Like, is my vagina not good enough for you, or what? When I asked him he just said something vague about it being good to try new things. But it seemed like something more than that to him. It never made any sense to me.”

“Another gay man in denial?” asked Duke as he topped up her glass.

Jennifer looked surprised at this but considered it, then shook her head, unconvinced.

“I read a thing a while ago,” Julia began as she accepted a top up from Duke as well, “about how there’s this thing in straight-men-porn that if you can just get a girl to take it up the ass then all of her inhibitions and repressions will magically fall away and she’ll let you do anything to her you want. Like she'll suddenly become some perfect porn star or something, and never say 'No' to you ever again.” There was a moment of appalled silence before Julia carried on. “He was trying to push past your boundary simply _because_ it was a boundary you’d set; _because_ it was something you didn’t want to do.”

“Fuck,” said Jennifer after a moment. She sat back in her seat, staring into the middle distance as she thought it through. “That makes a depressing amount of sense,” she said. “Why are men so awful?”

“That is fucked up,” agreed Duke.

“Straight men,” Jennifer amended. “No offence,” she added in Dwight’s direction.

“None taken,” he replied. “Guy sounds like a jerk.”

Julia played with her glass as she carried on, “This thing I read was talking about how there is still this dominant, default assumption that sex is something that a man does to a woman. Not something they do _together_ , but something he does _to_ her. And that’s where a lot of homophobia comes from because if you have two men together then there’s this idea that one of them must be giving up their supposedly naturally active role to have stuff done ‘to’ them, and if you have two women together then this attitude can’t get its head around how anything can even happen at all if there’s no active man there to do the sex to them. If you see what I mean.” 

Audrey and Duke were nodding, Dwight and Jennifer looking pensive. 

“So that’s obviously bad for anyone who isn’t straight, but it also seems like it helps to make sex and relationships for straight people way more difficult and unhealthy than they need to be as well. Like, surely it’s possible for a straight couple to have sex which is about a partnership, the both of them enjoying themselves together? It doesn’t have to be simply about what he does to her? Surely?” asked Julia, her tone laced through with an appalled kind of disbelief.

“It shouldn’t be,” Audrey said. “But you’re right, there is that default attitude in society still. It’s where a lot of rape culture comes from I think, I’ve seen that in witness statements. The way men will think that consent is an all or nothing, one-time thing, like; _‘She came back to my place and into my bedroom, so why are you trying to tell me what I did is rape? Why would she get into bed with me if she didn’t want me to do stuff to her?’_ There’s this assumption of passivity. It’s all part of the same thing,” Audrey agreed, sounding annoyed.

“Yep,” said Julia. “And it’s got to feed into that statistic about the differences in rates of orgasm for straight and gay women.”

Audrey nodded.

“Wait, what?” asked Jennifer.

“I forget the figure, but there’s some study that lesbians are way more likely to reach orgasm with a partner than straight women are.”

Jennifer looked appalled for a moment, then the surprise vanished. “Of course,” she said. “Why am I surprised at all.” 

“That one little idea having so many bad consequences for so many people,” Audrey commented.

They all nodded in depressed agreement for a moment. 

“And you know what?” Audrey added suddenly. “I’d actually bet it feeds into this other idiot who saved me the trouble of having to kick him out by leaving, but he had this … ongoing issue where he didn’t …” she scrunched up her face, searching for the right words, “... where he had an issue with how I got to orgasm basically, or when I didn’t.” She left a pause, possibly allowing for anyone who didn’t want to hear quite that much detail to change the subject.

“How so?” Jennifer asked after a moment.

“Sometimes he would blame himself, for not lasting longer, for not being enough of a man for me or some bullshit. And like you were saying,” Audrey said to Jennifer, “he was completely unwilling to listen to my opinion on the matter. He thought he should be able to make me come just with his dick. Seemed to regard it as some kind of failure of his manhood if that didn’t do it and I wanted his hands or his tongue as well.”

Julia snorted in disbelief.

“Right? And then more and more his concerns were directed at me. That the problem - ‘problem’ that didn’t exist as I kept trying to tell him - was that I wasn’t into him enough, or that I was too uptight or something. Seemed to think that if I’d really been into him I’d have been moments from orgasm as soon as he touched me and then his dick would do it every time. Dick,” she added turning it into an insult.

“Too much straight-man-porn,” Julia declared confidently.

“Yeah, you know what?” Audrey replied. “At the time I would not have thought he watched a lot - or any really - but now I’m reassessing.”

Dwight coughed, cautiously. “Not totally unrealistic though that you … that someone … some women … might come from … penetration,” he objected. “Is it?” he asked, curious.

Audrey shrugged, frustrated.

Julia offered, “Well look, I have no experience with men but what I do know is this - anatomically, the vagina is … what’s the word … like - equivalent … to your balls. It’s the clit that is on the same level as a guy’s dick. So ask yourself this, how happy would you be if someone spent the whole night playing with your balls and left your dick alone?” Dwight might have been about to answer, and from the look on his face it would have been something along the lines of ‘ _Not very’_.

But Jennifer spoke before Dwight could, finishing off Julia’s point by adding, “And then told you it was your fault you hadn’t had more fun?”

Dwight paused to give this some proper thought. “Pretty fucking fed up,” he admitted.

“Right! Thank you,” replied Audrey. “Fucking men,” she added with feeling. “Present company excepted of course, I am sure you are both very ... attentive.”

Everyone looked down at their glasses in a slightly despondent fashion for a moment.

“And then there's that thing about life expect’ncy,” said Julia, slurring the last word a little.

“What that women live longer?” asked Dwight. “I thought that was just….”

Julia stopped him with a raised hand and a shake of the head, though it was a moment longer before she got her mouth into gear to speak.

“Life expectancy after divorce,” she clarified. “Straight couple gets divorced? His life expectancy goes down, hers goes _up_. Up!”

“Yes that is terrible,” agreed Duke, “but, you are drunk. And it is late. I should probably be kicking you all out.”

“Well so are you drunk too as well,” Julia objected.

“Only a little,” Duke responded with a wave of his glass. 

“Then pour yourself another,” insisted Julia.

Duke opened his mouth to object but couldn’t seem to find a fault in her reasoning, so he gave in and poured more whiskey for each of them instead.

**Author's Note:**

> All of the studies and articles and whatever that Julia refers to are based on actual things that I vaguely remember reading about at some point. But I haven't done any specific research for this and I don't have any links to hand, so please don't take any of it as guaranteed; it's just a bunch of drunk people chatting at the end of the night after all.


End file.
